Why China’s State Soil Secrets Matter

Is this rice safe? The Chinese government doesn’t want consumers to know.

Anyone struggling to understand the uproar in China this week over environmental authorities’ decision to label soil pollution data a “state secret” need only look at a dispute unfolding in the country’s south between a Communist Party-controlled newspaper and several food companies.

At the center of the dispute: the whereabouts of more than 10,000 tons of carcinogenic rice.

According to an investigative report published Wednesday by the party-run Nanfang Daily newspaper (in Chinese), a large shipment of rice tainted with cadmium – a highly toxic heavy metal — found its way onto the market in southern China’s Guangdong province in 2009. The rice had been purchased in Hunan province by the state-owned Shenzhen Cereals Group, which proceeded to sell it in Guangdong even after discovering the cadmium, the report said.

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Shenzhen Cereals Group rejected the Nanfang Daily allegations in a statement posted to its website (in Chinese), saying it “took immediate emergency measures” as soon as it discovered excessive cadmium and sent the tainted rice back.

The Guangzhou Zhujiang Brewery, which was accused in the Nanfang Daily report of using the contaminated rice to brew its beer, also denied the newspaper’s claims, citing stringent internal quality checks, according to a report Thursday by the state-run Global Times.

While the mystery of what happened to the vast pile of cadmium-tainted rice has never been resolved, no one is disputing it existed – and that is where things get scary. Combined with earlier reports, including a 2010 U.S.-funded study that found Chinese cigarettes contained extremely high levels of heavy metals, the story suggests that something is very wrong with significant swathes of China’s agricultural land.

How big is the problem? Pan Genxing, an expert at Nanjing Agricultural University, says he thinks 10% of the country’s annual rice output, roughly 20 million tons, contains excessive levels of cadmium. But what about other crops and other forms of contamination?

The one organization in a position to say authoritatively how much of China’s land is laced with heavy metals is the Ministry of Environmental Protection, which in 2006 launched a nation-wide soil-pollution survey. Earlier this month, the ministry rejected a Beijing lawyer’s request to see the results of that survey, claiming the data was a “state secret.”

The ministry subsequently found itself being hammered, by social media users and state media alike, for its obfuscation.

While reflexive frustration with abuse of the “state secrets” excuse by bureaucrats accounted for a lot of the anger, many were also genuinely upset that environmental authorities had refused to release information with serious potential health consequences for the public.

The story of the cadmium-laced rice only drives home how grave those consequences could be. Cadmium is a carcinogen that can stay in the body for 30 years, the Global Times said, citing the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control. The newspaper noted that cadmium also causes itai-itai disease, a painful condition resulting from weak or deformed bones first identified in Japan in the 1940s.

“The source of the poison in the rice is the soil in which it was grown, but soil pollution is a state secret, so you’ll never trace the source,” wrote one user of Sina Corp.’s Twitter-like Weibo microblogging service on Thursday.

[CLARIFICATION: Pan Genxing's estimate of the levels of cadmium contamination in rice was based on a nationwide survey of rice supplies. An earlier version of this post mischaracterized Mr. Pan estimate as "just a guess."]

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